Recently in News Category

Well... in fact maybe some of us we are! But we are spending some of this time working on SHR.

We have been focusing on new shr-core images for last weeks, as well as some other nice improvements. And hopefully much more enhancements are coming soon, such as a better sound routing handling system :)


First of all, I have to tell you that we have some bad news today!
Lopi announced recently he officially abandoned the iphone SHR port because the linux kernel for those devices is no longer being worked on, so the port could never be completed as the kernel is not in a good shape (for instance it lacks suspend/resume).
Anyhow I hope  we will continue enjoying his presence in our project! :)

We even have more bad news: After Nokia Stopping the GNU/Linux phones and switching to windows phone 7, HP (that bought palm) will stop making new webOS devices. Those are bad news for SHR as we were having quite good success with the ports from webOS devices.
In the meantime, though, Android devices are becoming more standard (for instance the Nexus S has ALSA and V4l2. Its modem has a non-standard protocol, but an opensource implementation is beeing implemented in Replicant project by paulk and ius).


But let's talk about us now! SHR-core has been made possible thanks to JaMa and all the other developers who are migrating to it and fixing its bugs! For those who doesn't know what shr-core is: it is the shr-image created from new OpenEmbedded layered system, splitting configurations and recipes among several layers. For instance shr-core image is using openembedded-core, meta-openembedded and meta-smartphone layers among others. Finally, it's important to note that shr-core is not ready yet for end users as it still has some bugs which needs to be fixed, but hopefully it will be ready soon.

Next point! An alsa driver was written by Cotulla for qualcomm snapdragoon(QSD) android devices. It was writen for the htc leo (htc HD2), but it also works on nexusone device with minor changes. it's not complete yet but the sound quality is now perfect on the nexusone!

Meanwhile, GNUtoo has written two device porting guides on the wiki. There you will find information on how to port SHR on your device.

GNUtoo also hacked a bit on FSO these days, and now requesting Bluetooth resource launches bluetoothd automatically, which makes emtooth2 work out of the box for instance.

Palm Pre2 had some enhancements too: GRPS connection and WiFi should be properly handled by FSO now!

Nokia n900 is a work in progress and a better sound plugin for calls has been started by GNUtoo, mrmoku and DocScrutinizer). Recently dos1 adjusted fso configs to the new kernel, which means slider, special buttons (keyboard backlight) etc. are now working again. Finally, xf86-video-omapfb has been patched to run when using VRFB (static) screen rotation

The HTC Dream has now an improved sound driver that permits to get ringing and playing music at the same time (before it was not possible).

Hi there! after some busy weeks I can finally write something here :)

Let's see some of the most important news since aprox... omg! two months ago!


Applications:

• The phone UI now has a new button called suggestions which shows you some names from the phonebook to call directly.
• Emtooth2 can manage offline devices as of rev152. Apart from that, GUI has been improved and it now uses pages and inwinws instead of opening new wins. (Not yet in OE nor in SHR official repos, but you can build rev152 yourself).
  

FSO:

• Plugins have been splited into different packages in OE, so people won't get parts which are not necessary for their devices.
• Fsodeviced alsa routing bug fixed (the bug made fsodeviced segfault when the SHR phoneui volume control was slided during calls) (By mrmoku and GNUtoo).

HTC Dream: (by GNUtoo)

• DPI was added to xorg.conf in OE.
• gtkrc was corrected.
  

Palm Pre:

• Switched to mplayer 1.0rc2 as newer version causes the device to freeze.
• As our new internal PPP stack now finally works, morphis started to write a plugin for connman.

Nokia n900:

• FSO modem plugin can now register to the network (thanks to GNUtoo and mrmoku).
• GPRS is working on the n900!
• Camera is now documented on the install page (by GNUtoo)
• Audio calls work, but it must be rewriten to get better audio quality (By GNUtoo,mickeyl,DocScrutinizer

Hello everybody!

First of all, sorry for not updating the blog since about three weeks, mainly because I didn't have time to do it. But that doesn't mean we haven't done any improvements... au contraire!

So come on, let's see the most destacable news:

General:

• captainigloo has been investing some efforts on a On Screen Keyboard which looks promising for capacitative screens, so we may see some improvement in our keyboards in the near future.
• You can see Elfe (the upcoming home screen for SHR) in action in this youtube video.
• Devices section in wiki has been cleaned up a bit and now should have a better structure.
• Illume top bar can have now different default configuration for each device.
  

FSO:

• morphis has created a new fsoaudiod daemon for audio management.
• Currently there's only audio routing funtionality: supports palmpre and all other alsa using machines.
• It will be used in libphone-ui in the near future.
• Different audio streams (media, alerts, alarms, notifications, ...) will be available for applications in the future.

HTC HD2 (htcleo):

• Initial SHR support for this device.

Palm Pre:

• WiFi is now correctly integrated and can be used with liwi and other wireless tools.
• Added specific Illume topbar configuration for this device.
• morphis and mickeyl got PPP with fsogsmd working!
• msmcommd now includes support for Call Forwarding.

Iphone 3g:

• You can find the latest screenshots of SHR on the iPhone3G running Elfe here.
• Backlight and basic power management functionality has been added. For example, the LCD screen can now turn off.
• Fixed a bunch of cosmetic issues. For example, status bar buttons overlapped and illume-keyboard was scaled off the screen.
• Battery icon in the status bar now shows when the device is charging. However, the battery level only shows up properly in illume settings.
• WIP: Lock screen should be implemented soon. It's currently using the wrong lock screen that requires a password. GNUtoo explained how to fix this.
• WIP: Basic baseband functionality is in the works. Lopi is currently extending the modem_singleline plugin in fsogsmd. You can find the initial work done here.
• WIP: Need to enable devtmpfs in the kernel to fix the extremely slow boot times.
• WIP: Fix the battery indicator in the status bar to properly display the battery's charge.

Hi there!

I am not having much time lately to help and compile development related information, but fortunately there has been people writing news in the wiki about last updates and fixes. Let's see some of them:

General:

• Now Idle Screen detects the screen size and scales nicely to smaller screens (HVGA) like the Palm Pre (done by Slyon).
• accelges is now working again (by elisa42, and GNUtoo|Laptop).
• A bug in shr-settings has been fixed. After changing the timezone the new one will be displayed right away. (thx to peter).
• emtooth2 should be working better now as I fixed a long-standing bug which messed up the devices list/hash table when a "disappeared" signal arrived from bluez.

Phoneui: Contacts list now supports multiple selection of contacts (by Rui)

• press and hold for a while to do more actions on the selections (edit, unselect, delete)
• when you have only one contact selected, you can call, send sms, edit, unselect and delete
• when you have more than one contact selected, you can unselect all or delete (in the future, you will be able to send sms as well).

HTC Dream: Some more improvements by GNUtoo.

• Improved gtkrc's font size
• Improved illume environment's finger size
• removal of the useless udev in the newer images since the htcdream already used devtmpfs

Nokia N900:

• PaulFerster and GNUtoo finally got modem forwarding working!
  

Hi there!

Since some days ago there's lots of movement in the SHR mailing lists, and I'd say this is nice, really nice. There's lots of users and devs speaking about SHR future, giving ideas and making plans, and the most important thing: most of them seem eager to help! But in order to get all this help, we need first to make it easier for supporters to collaborate. Some of this work is already done, and some is work in progress or will be (hopefully) started soon, in the next few days:

• First of all, elisa42, GNUtoo and mrmoku have been cleaning the bugtracker and they are fixing long-standing bugs.
• We are still sorting out the better way to do it, but we will probably add JaMa's OE chroot environment into the SHR Makefile, so people have less troubles building their own apps and images using OE.

We have got some nice improvements too, for instance:

• GNUtoo has been looking at om-gta02 kernel config and has enabled some options which hopefully will bring us some speedup.
• [Rui] has been improving the shr_elm_sofktey module. It's buttons are now filling the blank space around them, and has added a new button which shows a list of the applications running.
• SHR testing RC3 is out.  It has new stable EFL version 1.0.0 and newer kernel 2.6.34.8. 
• Mickey Lauer is rewriting the N900 modem handling part, with more parts being in vala.

And finally, some spoiler of what's coming in next days. captainigloo is working in  a replacement for illume-home called elfe, which will give us much more eye-candy and will have E-modules support. You can see a video of an old version of it here.

Hello! I wanted to write some more News before going to FOSDEM tomorrow... because I guess we'll have lots of new interesting stuff to show once we are back home :-)


So here we list what the shr community has done in the last few days:

enjoy:
A patch was sent upstream to add basic FSO support. Basically it requests CPU resource automatically at startup so you won't need to disable suspend manually anymore. We already have this improved version in shr-unstable feeds.

sms receipts:
mrmoku has been working to support sms receipts in phoneui. Support is not complete though, as there are still some fsogsmd/opimd related bugs. Anyway, you can try it and give feedback to developers. You can enable it by default in phoneui configuration file or you can enable it on the fly by calling a dbus method.

VOIP:
There has been some efforts to start adding VOIP support to FSO. The chosen approach is integrating sflphone into FSO.

EFL 1.0:
Shr-unstable is now using the recently released EFL 1.0 libraries.

Palm Pre (plus/2):

• libmsmcomm is now able to handle basic sms messages.
• WiFi is now more reliable, but still fails sometimes when transmitting big files.
• Initial steps towards bluetooth support have been done in the form of a fsodeviced plugin.

Htc Dream:
US "extended" keyboard is now activated by default in xorg.conf. if you want DE or IT keyboard you'll need to adjust your xorg.conf manually.

Nokia n900:
A new rebase branch was pushed by GNUtoo that has all the 2.6.37 patches on top of it, but has alsa issues that need to be solved.

Yes, some good news! While this blog was apparently abandoned (just look at last post.. 6 months ago!), SHR has been evolving... and is still getting better with every new day.

So from now on, I'll be writing in this blog some of the hard work we, the SHR community, are doing so everyone both inside and outside the community will have an idea on what we are spending our efforts, what's done and what's still on the TODO list so someone who is eager to join in can help.

For your information, I will be writing these newsletters from information I'll collect in this wiki page:
http://shr-project.org/trac/wiki/News
At the moment I'm not a omniscent, so I'd appreciate your contributions to this wiki page when you discover some interesting information related to SHR ;-)

Enough introduction. Let's start!

migration to gdbus:
First of all, for those who didn't know, last weeks have been a bit problematic for shr-unstable, since all FSO framework was moved from dbus-glib to gdbus, and thus phoneui had to change some of its code to work properly and is now using gdbus too. A patch was applied to Iliwi to work with gdbus too.

shr-settings:
For those who love features, a new module has been added to shr-settings which lets you switch between fso alsa scenarios manually without having to fight against terminal and dbus.

Palm Pre (plus/2):
Lots of great new stuff on palm pre devices. First of all, libmsmcomm has been rewritten to vala. Wifi should be working since today. And to help users and development, we have 2 interesting little projects:

• fso-installer: GarthPS has been working in a bash script which configures and installs SHR in your palm pre phone. Even your aunt can now run SHR :P
• Bootr: Slyon wrote program which lets you dual-boot between SHR and webOS. You can see a video of bootr in action here.
  

Nokia n900:
This is one of the devices with better expectation at the moment. libisi is going to be rewritten in Vala to bring an easier and faster development. GNUtoo and mrmoku are working on the kernel side too, where patches are beeing rebased on top of the omap PM branch.

Nexus One:
GNUtoo has been working in an alsa driver for this mobile which you can find here, but it's still quite buggy. Please, note that Nexus One is not in OpenEmbedded yet, but apart from ALSA, all other components look quite usual (for instance gps = NMEA with FLOSS libraries, gsm = AT-commands, wifi = WEXT wifi driver, etc.)

HTC Dream:
GNUtoo has been working a bit on this device lately too, mostly polishing details. For instance, splash screen for the device is now pushed to openembedded, as well as extended keyboard, the last not being activated by default in xorg.conf though.
Despite trying another time, GNUtoo hasn't been successful at having wifi with PSM working. linux-next kernel branch can boot in the device now, but there's no input nor usbnet, so users will have to stick to 2.6.32 till support is improved.

Iphone:
I'm sure most of you didn't know, but it's a true fact that SHR runs on iphones too! Lopi has been working on adding support for iphone3g in openembedded. He has started his own project, which is using SHR at the moment: http://www.projectix.org
You can find a video of an iphone running SHR here.

I just pushed an update to the shr-testing repository. How to upgrade and what has changed?

--------------------------------------------------------------
Make big upgrades work
--------------------------------------------------------------
This upgrade will unfortunately require manual attention. Why? opkg downloads all upgrades to /tmp (which is in RAM), so for big upgrades your RAM will be full even before it starts upgrading.

There are 2 solutions for this:

1. Only install one package at a time, calling opkg multiple time. This is quite easy and described here: http://trac.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/opkg#Installonepackageatatime
2. Create a swap file that allows to swap out the downloads on the SD card. I recommend this anyway: http://trac.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/swap#Createaswapfile. If you are afraid that your SD card will die soon because of this, I don't think so and they are cheap anyway, so if you need to buy a new one every 2 years, what the heck.
   

--------------------------------------------------------------
Remove SHR-TODAY
--------------------------------------------------------------
Before starting the upgrade do "opkg remove -force-depends shr-today". Opkg *should* be removing this automatically, however according to some reports opkg failed to do so (due to opkg stupidness), and keeping shr-today seems to cause weird lockups. So get rid of it in advance.
UPDATE: JaMa told me that besides removing the package, killing the actual running process would also be useful. He is right. Kill the correct python process with "kill `pgrep shr-today`" as well.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Safety tipp: screen session
--------------------------------------------------------------
- Do run this upgrade (as in every upgrade) in a screen session. My FR display froze during the upgrade (access through ssh still worked)
- It's a big upgrade unfortunately which takes some time. All Enlightenment stuff seems to have been bumped.

--------------------------------------------------------------
What is new:
--------------------------------------------------------------
- Plenty of changes to the shr phone apps...
- Dimming is now done with a  dim phase rather than the simple on/off. Timeouts can be set for the Idle and Idle_dim timeouts. To make these changes persistent, modify the values in /etc/frameworkd.conf
- python-based shr-today is no more. It is now rewritten in C and integrated into the shr UI. It's reportedly faster than the old lock screen.

Bugs that I have seen:
- The new idle screen does not show the signal strength for me
- During the opkg upgrade process my phone suspended and this aborted the upgrading.... Annoying, I know. I now tap on the screen while updating which is pretty silly but.... Of course, what you should be doing is to automatically request the CPU resource while running updates using this technique: http://trac.shr-project.org/trac/wiki/opkg#Preventsuspendwhileupgrading

To sum it up: if you see mysterious screen hangs, you have still shr-today installed and/or running.

[Nov 19 2009, The Internets] It's been psychologically proven that the longer you wait for your presents, the more happy you will be when you finally get them. It seems, the SHR team wants to make you REALLY happy and has let you waiting for quite some time without updates to shr-unstable...

ENOUGH WAITING. Christmas comes a bit early this year, and a new SHR-unstable image is out for public consumption. Keep in mind that this is the first snapshot after quite many major transitions, so don't complain if things are a bit ..well... unstable in the beginning. We are working hard to stabilize things. If you depend on your phone, you will probably not yet want to use this, e.g. right now the ringtones aren't working (it just vibrates).

We had no resources to provide a nice and working upgrade path, so an opkg upgrade is very likely to lead to a non-working system. (Really! It won't work. We know you'll try anyway :). It still won't work). So download the image (lite or full), flash it and start afresh. I am writing this before the new images are out there, so be a bit patient before really grabbing it.

We will take a branch off current shr-unstable in a couple of weeks (after the dust has settled a bit) and start a conservative branch that will allow for more -testing releases and -finally- a stable snapshot. If others want to volunteer to do that, I'll happy hand over that job though.

So what has changed, and what to expect:

• First don't expect any miracles. While stuff has changed under the hood, you are still owning a fine piece of open. but outdated hardware. But a path has been laid for future improvements (also performance wise), so this is the way to go. Also, we have tried to keep the look and feel as similar as possible in the new phone apps. You will feel very much at home there. But improvements are much easier now.
  
• xorg server rather than glamo kdrive. We switched to using a proper xorg-server, with a graphics driver that is actively maintained. There have been some improvements, and developer Weiss thinks that there are more perf improvements to get.
• eglibc rather than glibc. Just like Debian did, we switched our libc library from glibc to eglibc which (apparently) is a bit better suited  to embedded devices.
• While the theme contest is still ongoing, we have decided to install the gry theme by Bernd Pruenster by default, it is faster than the default theme, which is not designed for obsolete embedded hardware. The illume theme is still set to "default" or "Illume SHR", so try setting it to *gry* through the top bar wrench (preference settings)
• The neo theme is also nice and fast. It is not installed by default, but it is in the feeds. You can easily install in with "opkg install shr-theme-neo". Another theme to try out is the niebiee theme which has been designed with speed in mind ("opkg install shr-theme-niebiee").
  
• the python-based frameworkd is being replaced bit by bit with components written in Vala. The first components that we use are fsousaged (which replaces ousaged), fsodeviced, and fsonetworkd. Mickey posted a status update on the new fso stuff.
  
• phonefsod replaces the ophonekitd phone daemon and and phoneuid/libphoneui are now responsible for all things GUI with the phone apps.
  
• opimd is included and we have the possibility to save incoming and outgoing SMS as well as contacts on the SIM card or on the SD card (using the sqlite backend). New SMS/contacts are now by default saved in a database on the FreeRunner (SD card or NAND), so be careful before reflashing! (Someone should probabably give instructions somewhere on how to change the configuration to use the SIM card as default and how to transfer data from one backend to another.)
• We have proceeded with the integration work with openembedded.org and we are very close to their development branch now, patches will be submitted to really merge SHR with upstream. This also means that we now have updated versions of basically every software component in this image. This migration has unfortunately caused quite some head aches and build problems...
  
• mokonnect was finally able to connect to my WEP WLAN without crashing the kernel :).
• We will be providing a possibilitiy to upgrade the kernel to 2.6.31 (including KMS goodness, see how-dri-and-drm-work) for adventurous users some time after this release. We just had to make a cut somewhere and this did not make it in yet.

What is NOT working:

• Ringtones are not working yet after the first call (it just vibrates). There is an issue related to the new fsodeviced and how it handles alsa sound profiles. We are investigating this issue. UPDATE: FIXED NOW SEE BELOW
  
• 2s Power button press does not shutdown, as the delayed action thingie seems broken. You'll just get the "shutdown" menu in any case ATM...
• "Hoversels" in python-elementary seem broken, so you can't switch profiles from the shr-settings app.
  
• The time is off as the timezone remains set to "Europe/London". UPDATE: FIXED NOW SEE BELOW
  
• Number-to-Name resolution is currently broken in the SMS message list. UPDATE: FIXED NOW
  
• ffalarms crashes when you add an alarm... So don't use your FR as an alarm clock with this image.

External packages, such as those from opkg.org might be broken due to the updated components. We do invite external app programmers to submit their applications for inclusion as a openembedded build recipe and have them added to the SHR feed, so that apps are just a simple "opkg install" away.

Finally, although this snapshot has taken quite some time, I think we should congratulate those people that have worked hard in their spare time to put it all back together, first and foremost mrmoku, who has been a great informal lead dev and tireless buildhost guardian. But also TAsn, dos1, JaMa, Heinervdm, JesusMcCloud, mickeyl, pb (and many others that I have forgotten now), as well as all those 3rd party application authors of apps that make the openmoko interesting.

UPDATE: Some of the issues are resolved already with a simple opkg upgrade (e.g. ringtones should work now). An upgrade of fsodeviced might require a reboot though.... But some upgrades from the initial image will require manual intervention. This is what I found so far:

• opkg remove -force-depends apm apmd
  opkg install task-fso2-compliance
  This will install the correct power management stuff and makes things feel speedier here. Try it and check if the animation of shr-today is nicer again.
• opkg remove -force-depends atd
  opkg install atd-over-fso
  This will probably make your ffalarms work again.
  
• opkg install tzdata tzdata-europe (or whatever package you want)
• Personally, I would also "opkg remove -force-depends avahi-daemon avahi-autoipd" to get rid of avahi.
  

Those fixes will automatically go into new images as we fix them...